My Flight Journal

Wednesday, September 10, 2003 8:21pm

I finally got back in the air after getting all 4 of my wisdom teeth ripped out. It's gonna take me forever to get my ticket flying once a month....

Winds were 030 [blowing out of the north-north east] at 13, and we use runway 9. You do the math. It's a good thing because I really need crosswind landing practice. We were also flying very late in the day, so the sun was just above the horizon and directly in my face on downwind. Made it really difficult to see anything. Plus it's really tough to read the instruments when your pupils are pinholes.

Something really cool and pretty rare: the tower was letting me do stop and go's on 9L, which is the main (big) runway at SFB. 9000 feet long and 150 wide. Damn hard to miss. They did move us over to 9R after a few though. My pattern work rocked. The crosswind threw me off a few times - especially at first - but I always corrected perfectly and was making all my circuits with a minimal number of power changes. It just felt so comfortable, I wasn't even thinking about it. Previously, a lot of my landings I would end up dragging it in a little bit, but these were all beautiful gliding landings. Very happy with myself there.

The first landing I made (with no advice on x-wind technique from my instructor) wasn't real pretty but it wasn't that bad. Only after that did he tell me what I should be doing and demonstrated the next one for me. After that we did 4 more and I nailed the rest, except for one that I actually put too much forward slip in. They all felt really good and he really wants to solo me. But in the dark (the sun was down when we finished) and in a strong crosswind isn't a good time to make your first solo. So now we're really just waiting till we get the time and calm winds. No biggie to me. It would have been cool to solo with a really low number of hours in the logbook, but I'd rather fly dual than not fly at all.

Oh, and I had a passenger in the back seat this time - first time for that. We were within 10 pounds of max gross for the 172. The thing I noticed the most was the climb performance sucked. I really wasn't used to seeing the trees off the departure end that close to the bottom of my airplane. One interesting thing was that I never had to adjust trim - which I normally do. From climbout to landing the trim was always just right.

I have to go to my brother-in-law's birthday party up in Jacksonville this weekend. My instructor suggested we fly up. And it'll qualify as cross-country so I can log it.